


Mistral

by TheLightAtLastAndAlways



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:42:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28635684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightAtLastAndAlways/pseuds/TheLightAtLastAndAlways
Summary: Avalon. The land of apples, shrouded in mist and legend--and magic. And now Branwen's home. Far from everything she knew, she lives and learns in this new world. But for all the splendor and the wonder, it has its own dangers.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

Prologue

The light splashed down over them like an ice-bath and Branwen’s shriek was snatched away by a space _between_ spaces; she didn’t even have time to wish she’d closed her eyes before she was shuddering against Mrs. Westcott’s side and gasping like light was something you could drown in. She pressed herself further into the shelter of Mrs. Westcott’s coat and skirts, which prompted a reassuring squeeze from the hand holding hers.

“Bit unpleasant that,” the older woman said consolingly, “but look—you can see it through the mists.”

Using the palm of her hand to scrub away the heat of threatening tears and snuffling, which made her chapped nose twinge, Branwen’s attention never made it to the mists, caught on what lay just beyond their feet.

They’d stepped into an alley and out of her familiar world, emerging between soaring megaliths like stepping through the doorcase of a giant. 

Shallow channels had been cut into the bare stone and they pulsed with the same eerie blue light that had snatched her from one place and realized her in another. She hastily moved the foot that crossed one of the lines, watching for long moments the subtle ebb and flow of the light with the same wariness usually reserved for especially large spiders before she dragged her gaze upward.

They stood atop a flat-capped hill ringed by more of the standing stones and she shivered at the patterns of light spiderwebbing between them. There were people too, standing beneath the mantle-stones, though she’d thought them statues at first. They wore gray cloaks that dragged the ground and their deep hoods had their edges stiffened by embroidery, but the sight beyond kept her from lingering on their shadowed faces.

For beyond the stones and the light lay a landscape drowned by fog, towers rearing up like the masts of wrecked ships.

Avalon. Island of mists and apple trees and everlasting kings, though Mrs. Westcott had laughed at that last. She’d said the closest thing they had to an everlasting king was Cailleach and _she_ was a sage.

And as for Branwen, she wasn’t being stolen away like a disobedient child in a fairy story—no, Branwen had been brought to the isle because she _was_ magical. 

That was why she’d woken up with her parents’ blood soiling her jumper and her parents had never woken up at all.

One of the cloaked people stepped forward, the movement parting the fabric to reveal _armor_ beneath. Branwen made a small sound of alarm, but couldn’t actually burrow any closer to her guardian. This seemed to amuse the armored woman and the soft, warm sound of her laughter made her human; Branwen stopped clinging quite so closely.

“Welcome back, Goodmage Westcott. I trust your journey went well?” the woman’s voice was as warm and as rich as her laugh.

“As you can see, we made it safe and sound,” Mrs. Westcott replied. “Sage Cathasaigh, this is Branwen Norwood. Sage Cathasaigh and her household are responsible for all the gates in Avalon that can be opened to the outside world,” she explained to Branwen, drawing her forward by her hand.

Branwen murmured something polite.

“Enter and be welcome in Avalon, little wilderkin,” Sage Cathasaigh replied. “The working has stabilized—Túirglen is waiting. Who is processing her admission?”

“Goodmage Guillory.”

“Ah. We shouldn’t keep her waiting then. Godsfavor.”

“Covenkept, Sage Cathasaigh.”

With that parting, Mrs. Westcott—or was it polite to call her Goodmage Westcott, as the woman had?—led her to a well-trodden path that took them down into the city. “The view is better with the fog gone off, but it creates less disturbance to open the gates at dawn or dusk.”

Branwen snuck a glance up at the woman holding her hand. Mrs. Westcott wasn’t at all what Branwen would have expected from her parents’ bedtime stories, which were populated by unnaturally beautiful women slender like willows or hags of ferocious ugliness or something of both if they were loathly ladies. She was one of those women that her mother described as “comfortable and well-settled,” which experience had taught her meant a woman of middle age who had gone slightly stout with good living, but not let herself go entirely.

“Oh. Where are we going now?”

Mrs. Westcott had said she was a housemother at Homely House, which was where Branwen would live with other students like her, ones who’d only just found out they were magical.

“We have an appointment with the registrar’s, dearie. We have to get you enrolled before we can go back to Homely.”

“Oh,” Branwen said quietly. “Are there tests? Will I get to study for them?”

She had always been good at tests, but any tests for magic weren’t likely to have a maths or sciences portion and what Latin she had was pretty dismal yet. But she didn’t want to think about school, because thinking of school meant thinking of the miserable string of days that had led to that terrible moment of impact on the carriageway. She was _not thinking about it_ , she told herself firmly, her ears beginning to ring faintly as her heart fluttered in her chest.

“Oh, no, nothing of the sort. The only requirement to attend Túirglen is to be wellsprung—or rather, I should say that being wellsprung within the borders of Avalon’s influence requires you to attend school here.”

She latched onto Mrs. Westcott’s steady stream of chatter to anchor herself in the present, trying very hard to pay attention to her stories of the city that would be her new home now. The older woman managed to be a warm, bustling bundle of energy among the damp, eventually ushering her inside a very foreboding sort of building whose arches seemed to be sprouting curling thorns. There was nothing comical about the gargoyles that clung to the arched entryway—and these watched her with glittering, _aware_ eyes as they passed below them. One shifted its wings restlessly and she had to swallow down her exclamation of surprise.

Her free hand came up to clasp at Mrs. Westcott’s sleeve, as if would somehow anchor her more securely than the hand already in her grasp. The long, narrow hall that awaited them inside wasn’t lit merely with elaborate lamps hung from the walls and the peaked ceiling, but also with floating creatures that drifted towards them from where they’d been languidly swimming.

Up close, they looked like something Sir David Attenborough would have presented about over on the BBC, some creature of the deep never before witnessed by human eyes, all flowing fronds and luminescent skin. Mrs. Westcott shooed them away like over-enthusiastic puppies. 

“Domesticated will-o-wisps, dearie,” Mrs. Westcott informed her when she caught her staring. “If you’re ever lost in a building, you can ask them to help you find your way. But you wouldn’t want to meet one in the wild! Extremely treacherous, though they don’t look it. Even ours can get a bit tricksy from time to time—don’t follow one with red yarn tied ‘round its tail. That’s the mark of a naughty child. Here we are,” she said as they came upon a door which proclaimed in gold leaf that it housed the offices of the registrars.

“And right on time, too, which is good luck for us—Goodmage Guillory can’t abide lateness.”

Branwen was ushered into a suite of offices, which at first glance were remarkable only for looking like they belonged to one of the older boys’ schools, though rather more spacious and with a distinct art nouveau aesthetic touched by gothic flare. Except that there were strange and fabulous things sharing space with the mundane. Something that looked very like a cat, if a cat had magnificent antlers, blinked at her as they swept past and yawned lazily as it shifted, spilling papers to the floor.

Goodmage Guillory turned out to a woman of singular intensity, her eyes nearly glowing golden as she glowered at them from behind her cage of paperwork. She reminded Branwen of one of the great cats at a zoo, all coiled potential barely contained and disdainful of human interest. This impression was furthered by high cheekbones beneath smooth olive skin and a mane of carelessly constrained black hair that seemed strangely to be golding with age rather than greying.

She would have suited her parents’ stories—even her clothing was like something Peter Jackson’s elves would have worn if there had been a Rivendell of the north, not the everyday sort of thing Mrs. Westcott had been wearing to fetch her. 

“Welcome, Miss Norwood, to Túirglen,” she said, her accent surprisingly and distinctively French, though not the university-trained Parisian accent of Branwen’s mother, which was the only one she could recognize with any sort of accuracy. She hadn’t been able to place Mrs. Westcott’s either, though she’d guessed somewhere rural and perhaps Gaelic-speaking.

Goodmade Guillory indicated one of the claw-footed chairs that faced her desk and Branwen went to sit quietly while Mrs.—no, Goodmage Westcott produced paperwork and Goodmage Guillory transcribed it, occasionally answering questions when asked.

“Well, I think that’s done it,” Goodmage Westcott said when they’d finished.

Goodmage Guillory surveyed her records before fixing her gaze on Branwen, who had to stifle the urge to shrink back in her chair. The older woman had not been mean, but she was the kind of brusque that was not comfortable when you were a little girl alone in a world far wider than anyone had ever told you. 

“You think that you are far from home,” Goodmage Guillory said. “You are not. You are not merely a student here, Miss Norwood. While there are many things that you will have to accustom yourself to, the first of these is that this is your home. Things like how to pay for the place you sleep and the food you eat are not things that a child living in their own home should concern themselves with. The fees for your tuition will be waived until such time as you come of age; after that, you will need to either need to secure matronage or a scholarship to stay on with us.”

“Largely a formality, dearie,” Goodmage Westcott assured her. “Wilderkin used to be taken in directly by families, but, well, when we stopped doing that, it didn’t stop people from wanting to help as they could. There are any number of scholarships and matronage being offered is quite common. And if you decide that you’d rather enter into an apprenticeship instead, the other housemothers and I will do our best to find a situation to suit you. Between the three of us, we’ve quite some practice at it! But that’s for some time in the future yet.”

Goodmage Guillory took up the thread of the conversation again.

“We speak the same language, but you will probably still find Avalon strange and perhaps difficult at times. You will have to be taught those things which the children of this island have been raised to know—the common sense of a foreign culture. For these reasons, wilderkin take assimilation classes until they come of age. These will be taught at Homely by your housemothers and housefathers and are in addition to the regular classes.” 

“What will—,” Branwen cleared her throat and tried again, “What will my classes be like?” she asked, one hand tugging nervously at her sleeve. “Will everyone else know magic already?”

“They will all have more knowledge of magic, of course, but you will find most of them little-practiced at your age. Magic does not manifest in very young children.”

“Something we are all immensely grateful for,” Goodmage Westcott interjected fervently, which earned a brief and wry smile from the other woman. “You needn’t worry about classes immediately in any case. Even if you hadn’t woken so late in the term, we usually keep wilderkin out of classes for a bit so they can settle in before you have to focus on schoolwork.”

“This also gives us time to correctly place you in the classes suitable for your skill level,” Madame Guillory added. “Enrollment here, as opposed to village schools or private tutelage, is not required by law until a child reaches thirteen, so it is often the case that you will be in small groups with a single teacher conducting several classes at once with the aid of several older students acting as tutors. This can be a little chaotic, so I hope that you are a motivated student, Miss Norwood. In the new term, you might reasonably expect to take mathematics, history, literature, Magical Ethics, geography, and astronomy. Make no mistake, child—magic is also effort.”


	2. Chapter 2

“I have returned triumphant from the fray!” Oz announced, but a lively sidestep to take himself out of someone’s path clipped their table and set the glasses to rattling. Branwen had to save one that had been left carelessly near the edge from toppling, all while Oz laughed and accepted the apology of the person who’d been trying to pass with his usual charm. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, lowering his hand and bringing the dishes he’d been levitating within reach. “There’s the black seabream for Lucas, venison for Nor—nice catch on that glass—and mine’s the pork.”

Aside from these, there were a variety of vegetable dishes to share and it seemed Oz had taken the initiative to order two or three more drinks for everyone rather than brave the crush again, though it made the table nearly as crowded as the rest of the establishment. There were enchantments etched onto the glasses to keep the drinks chilled and baked into the plates to keep the food hot; she suspected there had once been some sort of privacy wards carved onto the end of the table, but those were difficult to maintain in public places.

The noise of the room—lively with the chatter of students relieved at the end of the exam period and the stomping feet and exuberant music of a gallivant—provided its own kind of privacy, but she still took the opportunity to use the condensation beading on the outside of her first glass to construct her own temporary ward after Oz had seated himself.

The basic glyph set the raw form, but as she hadn’t learned the subtleties of warding yet, she had to rely on her skill at incantations to further structure it. Before she’d removed her finger and sealed the glyph, she thought, as if recalling a line of text: _unseen walls strong as stone twelve feet thick, soaring high and never faltering, though the air was sweet and the temperature was pleasant._

“Caer,” was the word she said aloud, stalwart and without hesitation, and the spell snapped into place with an almost inaudible shift of air pressure. More strongly felt was the sudden exclusion of the heat and noise of the room.

Some of the tension fell out of her shoulders—Branwen had never much liked crowds, but any public eatery worth frequenting was filled to overflowing tonight. Not that The Swift was ever precisely quiet; the choice this year had been Oz’s and he had always preferred a room where the mood was as high as the lifts in the dancing.

His personality would likely have made him attractive regardless of his looks, but Osbert was tall and fair-haired and reasonably fair of face as well. He looked especially dashing tonight, with an overrobe of grey wool that featured elaborate cutwork that revealed the rich burgundy robe beneath, reminding her of the lamps and lanterns that his mother was famous for. Like most male clothing, it was designed to emphasize a man’s best features while still maintaining a modest hemlength.

The wide sleeves of the grey outer robe were slashed to the elbow to reveal the tightly fitted sleeves beneath, emphasizing his well-developed forearms and open well past the throat to reveal his collarbones. The burgundy under-robes were cut just below the knee in the front so as to display the two-inch heeled boots in a rich brown leather that emphasized his height and his calves, while the floor-length back featured a swallow tail cut for mobility.

It was really a very striking look and she expected that Oz wouldn’t lack for dance partners after she’d already slunk off back to Homely.

“And now we sit within the infamous Fortress of Solitude, first seen during the exam period four years ago,” Oz narrated as if conducting a tour of some storied place. “Ah, before I forget,” he said, riffling through his discarded satchel and removing a small box which he handed to Branwen. “A congratulatory gift.”

“For what?” Branwen asked blankly as she tugged gently at the ribbon. The outer brown paper unfolded to reveal a box crafted of gingerbread that fell open like a flower blooming to expose an exquisite marzipan figurine. Tiny white birds were held in flight around a white tree by nearly hair-thin sugar spokes.

“It’s beautiful. And was probably ridiculously expensive. You shouldn’t have,” she said sternly to Oz. 

“I should. It’s for taking first on the exams again, so it had to be special. After this many years of buying you books and stationary, your room at Homely has to look like one of those little specialty shops where they’ve got so many things crammed everywhere that you’re afraid to breathe and dislodge some important structural component.”

“Well, it’s not quite that bad. But the exam period just ended,” Branwen protested. “They won’t release our scores until after the Solstice. There’s no guarantee I’ll take first again”

Lucas rolled his eyes. “Given that you’ve taken first every year that you’ve been here, if you don’t take it, you can treat it as a consolation gift. I’ve already bought you a pen. I’m not creative with these things like Oz.”

“As you can see, we’re fairly certain you’re going to do splendidly. Again. Lucas on the other hand…”

“Hey,” Lucas bit out sharply. “I do alright.”

And he did, if one took into consideration that for several years after being brought to Avalon as a wilderkin he’d spent most of his time being spiteful, resentful, and making regular attempts to run away from Homely altogether. This was in addition to having woken very late to his magic—even if he’d whole-heartedly dedicated himself to his studies after that it would have been a challenge to draw even with his peers, constantly relearning things that other wellsprung in his age-group took as common knowledge. 

She and Oz exchanged a look. “Maybe we should just drink to having between you, me, and Merry raised him to this age?” Oz offered teasingly, raising his glass of cider.

Branwen’s lips quirked as she raised her own glass, though it was filled with apple juice of the unfermented kind, sweet and crisp. “To raising dragons.”

“Ha. Ha. Ha. The pair of you are hilarious,” Lucas rejoined, but clashed his glass gently against theirs regardless.

After being grudging for years about growing out his hair in the Avalonian style despite being regularly referred to as a “sheared sheep,” Lucas had in this last year finally stopped cropping his hair like he expected to be able to walk back into his life in Surrey at any moment. He hadn’t been able to avoid dressing according to the island’s standards of male modesty, but he’d clung to that last vestige of life outside the mists long after the worst of his anger had faded. It was in the awkward stage where it was too short to even tuck behind his ears but quite long enough to flop into his eyes, leading to a habit of raking back his hair with his hand.

In contrast to Oz’s flashier feathers, Lucas wore a dark grey overrobe split full to the shoulder with sky blue embroidery at the hems, with navy blue robes beneath.

“You know, the first time I heard that metaphor, I didn’t get it at all,” Lucas admitted as he spooned side dishes onto his plate after Branwen had finished the grace. “I thought they we talking about me in specific. I might have broken, well—”

“A lot of things?” Branwen suggested, which was a gentle understatement. Not just material things, but he’d hurt people too, lashing out with his unsettled magic as he railed about being kidnapped and shouted for police.

The kidnapping accusation had been true, in its way, and she did feel badly for Lucas—he’d woken like the children here behind the mists, softly and gently, not in a moment of great stress like Branwen and most every wilderkin she’d ever heard confess to their own circumstances. But he’d broken windows and bones and worse when his temper was high and his aging would have been out of step from the humans around him.

When the mists had first been closed, the old religion would have stoned or burned or hung him—if mayhaps deified him; now the new religion would have torn him open to search out his secrets.

Wilderkin were not left to face that world alone, and in the face of resentment or resistance to that saving, the housemothers and housefathers of Homely responded with endless patience and acceptance—and made certain that the other wilderkin offered the same.

Now her comment drew a rueful grin from Lucas. “A lot of things,” he agreed. “And it took me a while to be actually listening when anyone talked about other people to notice that they talked about not just me, or even just wilderkin boys, like that. That it was all boys. I was simultaneously insulted—were they calling us animals?—and flattered, because, well, I was a twelve year old boy. The unicorn stuff was much, much weirder, but that was later.

“Anyhow, because people here dressed like they were part of a RenFaire—I know, I know they don’t now, don’t give me that look, I’d never actually been to one—I thought that it was some weird chivalry thing. Like, men are dragons, so you have to protect women from them, or as a dragon, women are the treasure you have to protect. That sort of thing. It didn’t occur to me until someone actually set me down to explain it that women weren’t the passive treasure implicit in the metaphor.”

Oz snorted. “Well, treasure can occasionally have a will of its own. Which is when it’s most dangerous, so I suppose at a stretch that could make sense. Though spending any kind of time with a woman of any age, in any age, should soon disabuse you of the idea that they’re just pretty objects. It really makes one wonder about the thornborn. And yet it explains so many things.”

He looked expectantly to Branwen, who raised her brows and shook her head.

“I don’t have answers for that, but I can tell you that when Mother Westcott first starting using that phrase as some sort of calming chant for the rest of us, she explained it in full. You’d just arrived,” she said to Lucas, “So it went something like “Raising boys is like raising dragons. Left to grow according to their own nature, they’re a menace to society, violent and apt to the destruction of property if they have nothing better to do. But it would be a shame and a pity to pull their teeth and blunt their claws and break their wings, so we teach them to guard treasure.

“Getting in one that’s half-grown and angry—well, that’s a special kind of danger. When it bites at other dragons, they can’t help but want to bite back, even if they have generations of older dragons gentling them into their role as guardians. That’s where a woman comes in, dear. And not just older women, no—it’s not a very useful thing if a boy will do as an older woman asks, but won’t respect girls his own age. So you’ll have to do your bit, Branwen. Because that treasure? One day, that treasure will be something you will have made with your own hands and your own heart and you want to be able to trust that the dragons you’ll meet were all raised with care.””

“And that was an uncanny—and unflattering—bit of recall,” Lucas commented after a long moment.

“Not really,” Branwen admitted, “That was more of a compilation than a single conversation. Mother Westcott took us aside a lot when you were first brought in. You were more than a little bit of a terror and I’ve not much patience with people to begin with.”

“You have,” Oz reassured him, “improved immeasurably. I mean, everyone always feels a little bit sorry for wilderkin, but you made it very hard to feel sorry for you while you were in the same room.”

Lucas’s response to that was a rueful smile and to raise his glass, “To things that never lose their bitterness, no matter how much one might come to understand them.”

Branwen had complicated feelings about the closure of the mists—which long predated the Witchcraft Act of 1604 and involved a religious debate that had resulted in the decision to draw the rampant energy of creation into places like Avalon, where they could deal with the creatures spawned by the restless shifts of creation and quell other dangers to thornborn without inspiring envy or worship as they had in the past—but found nothing very complicated about feeling sorry for a friend who had to live knowing that his parents were just beyond the sea and he would never see them again.

“Speaking of bitter things,” Lucas said, “there’s something I need to tell you both.”

“Well, that’s a lot more ominous than just coming out and saying it,” Oz said after exchanging a look with Branwen. “And here I thought we’d finished with dark detours for the evening.”

“After the spring term—I’m not coming back to school.”


	3. Chapter 3

“You’re not _what?!_ ” Branwen demanded flatly.

“Let’s hear him out,” Oz advised. “Even terrible decisions get time for explanations. And just what are you snickering about over there?”

Lucas’s lips were still twitching as he replied, “Sorry, it’s just—sometimes the two of you do such convincing impersonations of parents that I don’t really feel I’m missing out on having them.”

“If you don’t start talking, I’m going to stop helping,” Oz warned.

He sobered a little at that, which salved Branwen’s pride, even if it didn’t do much to assuage her temper.

“For a long time,” Lucas began, “all I wanted to do was go home. And then it was just keeping my head above water—it was all I could do not embarrass myself. And now we’re at the last solstice before the one where we’ll come of age and I…I still have no idea what I want to do with myself. You know,” he said to Branwen. “You’ve known from probably the first time you stepped through the doors of Amalgaid—you’d found a place where you’d belonged and never wanted to leave it.” His glance slid to Oz. “And you—you learned to love metalwork at your mother’s knee.”

“This solstice we stand beneath the earth to see where we’ll stand beneath the sky this summer, to help guide us toward a path that suits both our interests and doesn’t outstrip our magic. But that doesn’t mean much when it’s like—and don’t you dare make fun of me, Nor, I spent a lot of time thinking about this metaphor when I was trying to work out how to tell you—like you’ve been dropped in the middle of this forest and you can see all sorts of paths all around you, but not a single one calls to you any more than any of the others.

“I tried—I really did. I looked over the course catalogue and some things looked fine. But just that. Just fine. There was nothing that made me think—“Yes, this is what I want to do with myself for the next twenty years.” And I don’t love learning for learning’s sake, either. So I talked to Merry. Don’t look at me like that—you’ve have invented some sort of interests survey and then presented me with a list and I didn’t want lists, I wanted—well, I wanted to know what I want and you’d have just given me that same narrow-eyed look you’re giving me now. And Oz would have taken me to the forge and encouraged me work through whatever was bothering me by beating on a bar of metal and that’s just—not useful at all. And if I’d said that, father would have just sent me to ask my mother.

“Merry’s mother and her husband are always doing new things, picking up trades and putting them down like they’re browsing books in the library, so I thought that perhaps Merry might… At the end, I decided that I want to find what I want to do by doing it. I want to see this island—to meet people as strangers, rather than gaolers. To wander through the mists and maybe find things to do that I enjoy instead of just—just _being_. You love this place more than anything, but Túirglen was first a prison to me. I want to…to be reborn without that bitterness. So, please, won’t you support me in this?”

This was all said in a great rush and by the time he’d finished, Lucas was flushed and braced like a man anticipating a blow.

So Branwen suppressed her own instinctive hurt—there was nothing actually wrong with seeking Merry’s advice over her own, after all, and even she had to own that while she had nothing against going immediately into a trade she would have absolutely been appalled that he had no trade in mind—and asked, “Is that why Merry isn’t here tonight? I thought it was strange. Will you be staying with her parents?”

Cautiously, like a hedgehog relaxing its spines, the tension fell from Lucas’s shoulders. “Yeah. As a fosterling, even though I’ll be of age by then, but apparently there are legal and magical protections that Neve can exert through the oath even though I’ll be an adult.”

Branwen regarded him for a long moment. “If you’re really leaving school in the spring, I’m requiring you to take Private Rites, Bonds, and Oaths in the upcoming term. Because you really should have learned about fostering in the wilderkin classes and that make me worry about other things that you don’t know.”

Lucas eyed her warily. “That’s it? You’re not going to, I dunno, do that thing where you talk at me like I’m about quick as a brick?”

Branwen frowned at him. “I’m not that bad.”

“Tell that to my younger self those years I gathered my courage and risked pride and dignity to ask for guidance during exams.”

“Ah, a toast to brave, foolish youth,” Oz murmured into his cup. “His household spells should be fair enough, but Homely doesn’t have anything except wisps, so we might want to get him in one of the general creatures courses. I think there’s one that specializes in domesticated magical beasts, but from the way Merry talks, they’ve a whole traveling menagerie. Oh, and riding—neither of you have taken a course on that yet. Let’s see, what else is there?”

“If he can’t manage accounts by this point, there’s no hope for him anyway, so we don’t have to worry about that,” Branwen mused, dragging paper and pen from her bag and carefully making room for it on the crowded table.

“And no,” Oz said as he plucked the pen from her hand and put the paper on the seat between them. “Not tonight, Nor. That would be disrespectful of all the effort put into cooking and serving for so many on a feast night.”

Branwen glanced down at the writing materials and considered momentarily defiance—but there’d been hardly room to put the paper down on the table anyway.

They talked for a little while longer about courses that Lucas might want to take in the spring, but then the conversation turned to the ceremony they’d all undertake on the solstice. Individual birthdays might be celebrated by families, but society recognized only the official rite conducted in high summer as one’s coming of age.

“Wil,” this was Wilhelm, Oz’s older brother, “says that this one is more nerve-wracking than the summer rite. That one’s awful because you have to do it in front of people, but he says aside from the anxiety of discovering your circle, there something really otherworldly about the caverns underneath the Wailing Grounds. The magic pools there so heavily he says it’s like drawing cold mist into your lungs with every breath and when you step into the water there’s this sensation that you’re about to be pulled down into some ocean you couldn’t see by some massive creature you can’t name. Wil did say it didn’t seem to be as awful for the girls in his class, so part of the sensation might be because of the Lady.”

There was a daughter of Cailleach sleeping beneath the grounds of Túirglen—and she had been dreaming there for a long time, before the city, before the war, and even before the mists.

Lucas groaned as he rose and began gathering their dishes. “I don’t want to think about it. I really don’t.” He sung something to himself under his breathe and those things he couldn’t balance on his hands began to float steadily in the air above head height.

“I’m not like Lucas,” Branwen said softly as her dark-haired friend vanished in the press of people, “I liked things as they were—as they are. I would have been happy if we’d all stayed here forever.”

“Well, I don’t know about Merry—I think she’ll leave school whenever she feels it’s time—but I’ll be here with you for a while yet. Since Túirglen exists to teach, most workshops don’t take in apprentices without at least three years under the masters here. There’s Lucas coming back,” he said. Branwen caught sight of Lucas, who made eye contact with them, raised a hand in a clear gesture of farewell. “And there’s Lucas attempting to escape.”

As soon as he turned his back to disappear into the crowd, Oz grabbed Branwen’s hand and charged through the crowd with the skill of a seamstress threading a needle, snatching at Lucas’s forearm before he made the door and pulling them both back onto the dancefloor.

“Come along, Lucas. I won’t even make you dance with a stranger,” Oz promised. “Since Merry isn’t here, we’ll wait for a knight’s riding.”

A knight’s riding was the term for any dance that called for multiple male partners to a single female one. They were usually aggressively athletic and the cooperation of the men helped to defray the physical strain of it—they were meant to make the lady look like she was flying—but the footwork was complicated.

Branwen was weak to Oz’s appeals, which meant she had the competence of significant practice, but Lucas was made of sterner stuff and was a less confident dancer because of it. 

“You shouldn’t have tried to escape,” she told Lucas lightly. “You know that it only makes it worse when you try to escape.” She peered up at him thoughtfully, then dropped her gaze to his boots. “You wore new boots, didn’t you?”

“I wore new boots,” Lucas confessed with a groan.

“They even have a proper heel!”

“Something I’m regretting.”

“You’ll live,” Oz assured him dryly. “Besides, it builds balance and dexterity. Enough of that and maybe I’ll stop thrashing you so badly in weapons practice. Whether it’s with weapons or women, footwork makes all the difference in dancing.”

“You’re so lucky women don’t wear heels,” Lucas muttered to Branwen as the music changed.

“Height makes a man handsome,” Branwen quipped as she pressed her one palm to his, while Oz’s warm palm met hers on the other side.

Then she really had no time for talking as the first thrumming beats became a hard gallop through the countryside. This wasn’t a dance that was stepped lightly—it was a stomping dance, every beat like thunder, and the sheer exuberance of it was hard to escape. Even Lucas was laughing as the dance came to close, his hair clinging to the sweat at his temples, curling slightly.

But she and he left Oz there after the dance was finished, escaping into the cold night to walk back to Homely. The cold alone would have sapped some of the euphoria of motion granted by dancing, but it was more the melancholy of walking through the dark, their breath curling in the air, and knowing this was the last winter they would be celebrating the end of exams together.

She had too many things she wanted to say, so she said none of them, walking in silence.

Lucas had been granted special permission to leave Túirglen for the break, to meet with Merry’s parents and make arrangements for the summer, and left early the next morning. Oz left later, without ever having been to bed, which left her alone. 

This was not entirely a bad thing.

The library was always delightfully, echoingly empty for the winter hols, and the librarians who were there to maintain the collection—students sometimes folded hexes into the pages of books or removed the preservation charms so that they could make notes in the margins—were so accustomed to her that they treated her like a fixture of the library, a part of her cubby by the windows that had such excellent light in the mornings.

Usually it became her playground—her opportunity to lay out as many books as she liked without feeling guilty of hoarding and to annex as much space as she wanted along the long tables and to ignore every meal that she pleased. As she’d gotten older and gained something of a reputation among the staff, they would even leave her projects in place until it was time to restore the library to good order for the new term.

This time, however, she found herself restless and endlessly anxious as she worked out potential schedules for each of the circles that she might declare in. Even the unlikely ones, like the first and the seventh.

Eventually she managed to ignore her anxiety long enough to discover a few new delights—even she could be surprised by a library this massive—and to re-read her favorite sections of the richly animated _Sages Through the Centuries_. Meant for older children, _Sages Through the Centuries_ had been as much a part of her introduction to Avalon as Homely House’s worn-despite-magic copy of _Magic Is Everywhere_ and _Avalon Through the Ages: An Animated History_ , the latter in twenty slim volumes.

Everything had been wondrous strange to her back then, not only the magic, but the stories and the histories both had been unlike anything she’d heard before. The magic that ran so strongly through them made one of them seem much like another to a child—they were both full of magical beasts and valiant men and looming larger than them both were the women who strode through the pages rendering judgments, felling and curing and quelling all manner of men and beast, and building legendary friendships—and enmities—that would last centuries. 

From the comfort of a plush chair in the reading rooms overlooking the garden—usually crowded during the term—she galloped along with the bold and iron-willed Angharad Y Coch, who’d gathered the first and most famous of ridings and ventured into the wilds of ancient Avalon, domesticating what magical beasts she could and exterminating those she could not, making it a sanctuary instead of a place where only the powerful dared to venture.

Her most stalwart companion had been her horse, whose hooves had been hard as steel and whose flanks were black-dappled like thunderclouds—and whom she’d later marry, when she managed at last to unravel his curse.

Though she’d had to notice it first.

The most serious stories were the preserve of history—forests you could walk into and never walk out, beasts of every shape and size, and the terrifying reality of wellsprung who used their power to serve their own purposes—but later authors had embellished at length the comic misadventures of a heroine who could do everything but see Cadfael right in front of her. These were Branwen’s favorites, and Angharad her favorite historical heroine, though she was by no means the only one to loom almost larger than life, mingling history with pseudo-history.

Time slipped by her like pages turning and suddenly it was like those nights where, after only one chapter more, the day before the solstice dawned before she knew it had gotten dark.


End file.
